A national institute responsible for procurement has deployed Bonita to automate several of their core administrative processes

Automation: six processes in six months.

A national institute responsible for procurement has deployed Bonita to automate several of their core administrative processes.

They contacted BMLaurus to automate six of their labor intensive processes.

Challenges

The institute’s main aim was to control and monitor every acquisition for their Public Administration.  

From simple purchases to complex constructions, this national institution handles multiple diverse transactions. Transactions of this scale generate copious amounts of documentation, letters, complaints, inspections, audits, and travel by employees. A tool was needed to streamline theseprocesses by providing a  common environment for them.

Use of a BPM tool for administrative processes was intended to free up some of the time their staff was currently spending on administration, to allow them to respond faster to contractors and other stakeholders involved in the thousands of acquisition processes. Their aim was ambitious: reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork, and identify and remove bottlenecks in their processes.
With these goals in mind, this institution set out to improve six administrative processes in six months.

Later, the institution extended their contract with BMLaurus to improve and automate four additional core business processes in four months. These new requirements included requests and approvals for the following scenarios: Human Resources processes for vacation time requests, reimbursement and travel requests, import management for when a good or service is not manufactured locally, and incident management for reporting issues with their public acquisition software.  

Another process with specific requirements was the documentation process. The institution’s documentation process is relatively simple to describe, yet complicated to deploy.  The documentation process starts when an entity, such as government department, submits a request. A request can be submitted for a number of reasons ‐‐ for instance, to report an issue with a provider or merchandise.

Once the request is submitted, the system needs to ensure a document or license for the vendor is not expired, and that the vendor or provider is indeed a valid entity. Then the documentation request is routed to one of five possible approvers. The process is complete once the approver electronically signs the request.

The choice of Bonita

BMLaurus considered three types of BPM solutions: custom developed solutions, licensed BPM tools such as Websphere and Polymitia, and Open Source BPM solutions such as Intalio and Bonita.

BMLaurus found Bonita to be the most user‐friendly solution and offered an easy means to connect to the institute’s ERP & other databases via custom built and customizable out‐of‐the‐box connectors.

Bonita was also very cost effective compared to proprietary vendors. In addition, they appreciated the professionalism and business model of Bonitasoft. They valued this open source solution with both community support, and commercially available support from Bonitasoft's experienced Professional Services team who have worked alongside the research and development team for more than three years.

The institute’s staff also took three days of remote training to apply process modeling.

Benefits

BMLaurus deployed ten processes with Bonita. Since the institution’s Human Resources team is no longer manually handling tasks such as making calculations of employee’s per diem payments for travel, they are now more productive and can focus on other responsibilities.

Using Bonita, the institution has reduced the amount of paper involved in processes now that so much of their request and approval is completed online and with digital signatures. There are approximately 300 employees the institution. From the General Secretary to the Junior Assistant, all of the employees have used Bonita to request, approve, or manage a particular process.

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BMLaurus

BMLaurus has been a partner of Bonitasoft since 2011. Operating in Ecuador since 2007, BMLaurus is focused on generating positive results for their clients. Through their training services, consulting and implementation of technological solutions, they make easier the management of projects, quality & processes and technology of numerous organizations.

“After implementing Bonita, the time dedicated to paperwork for administration was actually reduced and with open source software, we were able to close the gap between cutting-edge technology and price."​​​

Santiago Cartagena, Consultant, BMLaurus